The
following is a chapter from The Politics of Bad Faith, by David Horowitz

(Touchstone Books, 2000)

THE ROAD TO NOWHERE

The self-deification of mankind, to which Marxism gave philosophical
expression, has ended in the same way as all such attempts, whether individual
or collective: it has revealed itself as the farcical aspect of human bondage.

It has been over a decade since this silence as durable as an iron
curtain descended between us. In these circumstances, I have had to depend on
others to learn how you regard me these days: How, at a recent social
gathering, you referred to me as “one of the two tragedies of the New Left”
(the other being a former Brecht scholar who now publishes guides to the nude
beaches of America); how my apostasy has inflicted an emotional wound, as though
in changing my political views and leaving the Left I had personally betrayed
you.

I understand this. How could it be otherwise for people like us, for
whom politics (despite our claim to be social realists) was less a matter of
practical decisions than moral choices? We were partisans of a cause that
confirmed our humanity, even as it denied humanity to those who opposed us. To
leave such ranks was not a simple matter, like abandoning a misconception or
admitting a mistake. It was more like accusing one’s comrades. Like condemning
a life.

Our choice of politics was never a matter of partial commitments. To
choose the Left was to define a way of being in the world. (For us, the
personal was always political). It was choosing a future in which human beings
would finally live as they were meant to live: no longer self-alienated and divided, but equal, harmonious and whole.

Grandiose as this project was, it was not something we had invented,
but the inspiration for a movement that was coterminous with modernity itself.
As you had taught me, the Left was launched at the time of the French
Revolution by Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals. In Marx’s own
words: “The revolutionary movement, which began in 1789,...and which
temporarily succumbed in the Conspiracy of Babeuf, gave rise to the communist
idea,...This idea,...constitutes the principle of the modern world.”[2]
With a terrible simplicity the Babouvists pledged themselves to “equality or
death,” swiftly finding the latter -- in a prophetic irony -- on the
Revolution’s own busy guillotine.

The victorious radicals had proclaimed a theology of Reason in which
equality of condition was the natural and true order of creation. In their
Genesis, the loss of equality was the ultimate source of mankind’s suffering
and evil, just as the arrogant pride of the primal couple had provoked their
Fall in the religious myths now discarded. The ownership of private property
became a secular version of original sin. Through property, society re-imposed
on every generation of human innocence the travails of inequality and
injustice. Redemption from worldly suffering was possible only through the
Revolution that would abolish property and open the gates to the socialist Eden
-- to Paradise regained.

The ideas embodied in this theology of liberation became the
inspiration for the new political Left, and have remained so ever since. It was
half a century later that Marx first articulated the idea of a historical
redemption, in the way that became resonant for us:

Communism is the positive
abolition of private property, of human self-alienation, and thus the real
appropriation of human nature through and for man. It is therefore the return of man
himself as a social, i.e., really
human, being...[3]

This was our revolutionary vision. By a historical coup we would
create the conditions for a return to the state of true humanity whose
realization had been blocked by the alienating hierarchies of private property.
All the unjust institutions of class
history that had distorted, divided, and oppressed mankind would be abolished
and human innocence reborn. In the service of this cause, no burden seemed too
onerous, no sacrifice too great. We were the Christopher Columbuses of the
human future, the avatars of a new world struggling to emerge from the womb of
the old. How could I divorce myself from a mission like this without betraying
those whom I had left behind?

Without betraying you, my
political mentor and closest comrade. We had met in London at the beginning of
the Sixties and you quickly became my guide through the moral wilderness
created by the disintegration of the Old Left. I was the scion of Communists,
troubled by the crimes the “Khrushchev Report” had recently unveiled; you had
distanced yourself from official Communism, becoming a charter member of the
New Left in the spring of 1956. Even as the unmarked graves of Stalin’s victims
were re-opened and their wounds bled afresh, the New Left raised its collective
voice to proclaim the continuing truth of its humanitarian dream. Stalinism had
died, not socialism. In the moral and political confusion of those years, it
was you more than anyone else who helped to restore my radical faith.

To be sure I was a willing disciple. To abandon the historic project
of the Left required a moral stoicism that I lacked. No matter how great the
enormities perpetrated in the name of socialism, no matter how terrible the
miseries inflicted, the prospect of a world without this idea, and its promise
of justice, was unthinkable to me. To turn one’s back on socialism would not be
like abandoning a misconception or admitting a mistake. It would be like
turning one’s back on humanity. Like betraying myself.

And so I, too, refused to give up on this idea that inspired and
ennobled us. I joined you and the pioneers of a New Left who had condemned
Stalinism and its brutal past and pledged to keep the faith.

We did not ask ourselves then, however, a question that seemed
unavoidable to me later: What was the meaning of this refusal to admit our
defeat? For thirty years, with only a minority in dissent, the best, most vital
and compassionate minds of the Left had hailed the flowering of the progressive
state in Soviet Russia. They had made the defense of Soviet “achievements” the sine qua non of what it was to be
socially conscious and morally correct. Now the Kremlin itself had acknowledged
the monstrous “mistakes” of the progressive experiment, confirming the most
damning accusations of its political adversaries. In the face of such epic criminality
and collusion, what was the urgency of our renewed dedication to the goals that
had proved so destructive in the first place? Why were the voices of our
enemies not more worthy of a hearing in the hour that seemed to vindicate them
so completely? Why were we so eager to hurry past the lessons they urged on us,
in order to resume our combat again?

Our radical generation was hardly the first (and not the last) to
repent in such careless haste. The cycle of guilt was integral, in fact, to the
progress of the Left. It had begun with the radical birth in Eighteenth Century
Paris -- that dawn of human Fraternity and Reason, which also devolved into
fratricidal terror and imperial ambition. How had the redemptive illusions that
inspired the Left been so relentlessly renewed in radical generation after
generation, despite the inexorable rebuke of human tragedy that attended each
of its triumphs? How had the Left negotiated these rebirths?

In the interlude following Stalin’s death, when our generation was
reviving its political commitments and creating the New Left, we did not stop
to ask ourselves such questions. We were all too busy being born. But two
decades later, when I had reached the end of my radical journey and had my
second thoughts, I was able at last to see how our own modest histories
provided the text of an answer.

Meanwhile, you have no such second thoughts. Even as I write, you and
your comrades are engaged in yet another defiant resurrection -- the birth of a
new generation of the Left, as eager to believe in the fantasy of a new world
as we were then. In this annus mirabilus
of Communist collapse, when the socialist idea is being repudiated throughout
the whole expanse of the Soviet empire by the very masses it claimed to liberate,
you and your comrades are still finding ways to deny what has happened.

For you and the prophets of the next Left, the socialist idea is still
capable of an immaculate birth from the bloody conception of the socialist
state. You seek to evade these lessons of the revolutionary present by writing
the phrase “actually existing socialism” across its pages, thus distinguishing
the socialism of your faith from the socialism that has failed. The historic
bankruptcy of the planned societies created by Marxist dictators, a human
catastrophe extending across nearly three quarters of a century and
encompassing hundreds of millions of ruined lives, will not be entered in the
balance sheet of the Left. This would require of you and your comrades an
accounting and an agonizing self-appraisal. You prefer, instead, to regard the
bankruptcy as someone else’s.

There is nothing new in this shell game. It is the same operation we
ourselves performed after 1956, when our slogan was: Stalinism is dead, long
live socialism. Today you see the demonstrations for democracy bringing an end
to Communist history and you are certain that this has no relevance to the
ideas that inspired that history in the first place. Here is your most recent
defense of the past:

Communist regimes, with the notable exception of
Yugoslavia after 1948, never made any serious attempt, or indeed any attempt at
all, to break the authoritarian mould by which they had been cast at their
birth. Conservative ideologists have a simple explanation of this immobility:
its roots are to be found in Marxism. In fact, Marxism has nothing to do with
it.[4]

“Actually existing Marxism” is dead, long live Marxism. This is the
political formula of the Left -- of your Left -- today. Veterans of past
ideological wars, like yourself, will be crucial in selling this hope to a new
generation. The moral weight of this future will be on your shoulders. In
reading your words, I could not help thinking how thirty years ago there was an
individual who provided the same hope for you, and who since then has become
the intellectual model for my own second thoughts. Perhaps you are tempted to
bury this connection. For there were not two, but three New Left apostasies
that touched you directly, and of these, the defection of Leszek Kolakowski was
by far the most painful.[5]

A philosopher of exceptional brilliance and moral courage, Kolakowski
had been the intellectual leader of our political generation. Even the titles
of his writings --“Responsibility and History,” “Towards a Marxist Humanism”--
read like stages of our radical rebirth. By 1968 those stages had come to an
abrupt conclusion. When the Czechs’ attempt to provide Communism with a human
face was crushed by Soviet tanks, Kolakowski abandoned the ranks of the Left.
He did more. He fled -- unapologetically -- to the freedoms of the West,
implicitly affirming by his actions that the Cold War did indeed mark a great
divide in human affairs, and that the Left had chosen the wrong side.

Kolakowski’s
apostasy was challenged by Edward Thompson, then the foremost English New
Leftist, in a 100-page “Open Letter” which you published in The Socialist Register1973. Written in the form of a plea to
Kolakowski to return to the radical fold, the Letter began by paying homage to
the example he had set for us all seventeen years before, and which Thompson
now claimed as a “debt of solidarity”:

What we dissident Communists [of
’56] did in Britain...was to refuse to enter the well-worn paths of apostasy. I
can think of not one who took on the accepted role, in liberal capitalist
society, of Public Confessor and Renegade. No-one ran to the press with his
revelations about Communist “conspiracy” and no-one wrote elegant essays, in
the organs published by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, complaining that God
had failed....We refused to disavow “Communism” because Communism was a complex
noun which included Leszek Kolakowski.

Here Thompson put his finger on a central reflex of the New Left
revival: our refusal to break ranks with our comrades and join the camp of our
Cold War opponents; in short, our ability to repudiate the catastrophic outcome
of a generation of radical effort without abandoning the radical cause. Not
even the crimes of Stalin could break the chain of our loyalties to the revolt
against bourgeois society that had been launched at its inception by the
Conspiracy of the Equals.

Because Communism was a “complex noun” which included Kolakowski, we
were able to preserve our allegiances to an Idea that still included Communism,
if only as a deformed precursor of the future to which we all aspired. Because
Communism was a complex noun we refused to concede that Marxism or
Socialism---integral elements of the Communist Idea---were themselves condemned
by the Stalinist nightmare. Kolakowski provided the bridge across which New
Leftists could march in a popular front with Communists to carry on a struggle
that they had begun nobly, but soon distorted and then tragically perverted.
Because Kolakowski was himself a complex noun, having spoken out for
intellectual honesty and humanist values while he remained a Communist, we
could do this without giving up our critical distance or self-respect.

Kolakowski, of course, was not alone. A generation of Kolakowskis had
appeared after ’56 to incite and inspire us. When you and I met in London in
1963, it occurred to me that if someone as morally serious and intellectually
dedicated as you could still devote himself to Marxism and the cause of the
Left---despite Stalinism and all that it had engendered---it was possible for
me to do so too.

There was one question that Thompson had failed to ask, however, which
occurred to me only later: When had Communism not been a complex noun that included individuals like Kolakowski
(and you)? Even in the most grotesque night of the Stalinist abyss, the
Communist movement had included the complexity of intellects as subtle and
independent as Trotsky and Lukacs, Varga and Gramsci, not to mention the
fellow-traveling chorus of “progressive” intellectuals who defended Stalinism
while proclaiming their humanism from the privileged sanctuaries of the
democratic West. Didn’t this say something about the futility of such
complexity, or its practical irrelevance?

In our minds, of
course, the true complexity of the Communist noun went beyond individuals to
encompass the nature of reality itself. It was the Hegelian complexity that the
idea of the future introduced into the present, that ultimately made us so
willing to discount the evils of Stalinist rule. This complexity was a creation
of our Marxist perspective, which decreed a divorce between appearance and
reality, between present reality and the future to come. Between class history
ruled by impersonal forces and revolutionary history ruled by reason, and
guided by the precepts of social justice. This vision of the future was the
heart of our radical illusion. We had rejected the crude determinism of our
Stalinist precursors, but our confidence in the outcome of the historical process
allowed us to put our talents on the Communist side of the global conflict,
even though “really existing Communism” was an offense to the spirit of the
socialism we believed in. In his “Open Letter” Thompson explained the paradox
by which we gave our allegiance to an intellectual abstraction and wound up
acting as partisans of a reality we disdained:

...In general, our allegiance to Communism was
political: it arose from inexorable choices in a partisan world in which
neutrality seemed impossible....But our intellectual allegiance was to
Marxism....Thus there is a sense in which, even before 1956, our solidarity was
given not to Communist states in their existence, but in their potential---not
for what they were but for what---given a diminution in the Cold War---they
might become.

Our solidarity was given to Communist states in their potential. New Leftists like us refused to become
anti-Communist cold warriors and offered “critical support” to repulsive
Communist regimes because we believed
they would change. It was the “humanist potential” of societies with
socialist foundations, not their totalitarian realities, that claimed our
allegiance. (By the same reasoning, we were unimpressed by the democratic
realities of the capitalist West, because private property rendered them
incapable of such liberation). We refused to join the attack on the Communist
camp in Cold War battles, no matter how morally justified, because we did not
want to aid those seeking to destroy the seeds of the future the Left had sown
in Soviet Russia. We were determined to defend what Trotsky had called “the
gains of October”-- the socialist edicts of the Bolshevik Revolution that had
abolished private property and paved the way for a better world. It was our
recognition of the epoch-making character of these “gains” that defined our
radical faith.

By 1973 Kolakowski had rejected this faith and the politics it
inspired. Thompson’s “Open Letter” was a refusal to accept the rejection. It
was an eloquent plea for the continuing vitality of the socialist future and
for the Left’s enduring mission as the carrier of historical optimism, the idea
that humanity could be master of its fate. It was, above all, a rebuke to the
leader who had once inspired but now spurned the radicals of ’56. “I feel,”
wrote Thompson, “when I turn over your pages a sense of injury and betrayal.”

Kolakowski no longer believed in Communism as a complex noun. He no
longer had faith in what he called the “secular eschatology” of the Left, the
political passion that sought to fuse “the essence of man with his existence,”
to assure that the timeless longings of humanity would be “fulfilled in
reality.”[6]
We no longer believed in the reality of the socialist Idea.

Kolakowski replied to Thompson in the 1974 edition of The Socialist Register, which I read in
America. Struggling, then, with my own doubts, I was drawn to his arguments
which seemed to promise an exit from the ideological cul de sac in which I had come to feel trapped. In these passages
he exposed the web of double standards that stifled radical thought and
transformed it into a self-confirming creed.

As you know, there is no hallmark of left-wing discourse so familiar
as the double standard. How many times had we been challenged by our conservative
opponents for the support (however “critical”) we gave to totalitarian states
where values we claimed to champion -- freedom and human rights -- were absent,
while we made ourselves enemies of the western democracies where (however
flawed) they were defended. In the seventy years since the Bolshevik Revolution
perhaps no other question had proved such an obstacle to our efforts to win
adherents to the socialist cause.

In his reply, Kolakowski drew attention to three forms of the double
standard that Thompson had employed and that were crucial to the arguments of
the Left. The first was the invocation of moral standards in judging capitalist
regimes on the one hand, while historical criteria were used to evaluate their
socialist counterparts on the other. As a result, capitalist injustice was
invariably condemned by the Left under an absolute standard, whereas socialist
injustice was routinely accommodated in accord with the relative judgments of a
historical perspective. Thus, repellent practices in the socialist bloc were
placed in their “proper context” and thereby “understood” as the product of
pre-existing social and political conditions -- i.e., as attempts to cope with
intractable legacies of a soon-to-be-discarded past.

Secondly, capitalist and socialist regimes were always assessed under
different assumptions about their futures. Capitalist regimes were judged under
the assumption that they could not meaningfully improve, while socialist
regimes were judged on the opposite assumption that they would. Repressions by conservatives like Pinochet in Chile were
never seen in the terms in which their apologists justified them -- as
necessary preludes to democratic restorations -- but condemned instead as
unmitigated evils. On the other hand, the far greater and more durable
repressions of revolutionary regimes like the one in Cuba, were invariably
minimized as precisely that -- necessary (and temporary) stages along the path
to a progressive future.

Finally, in left-wing arguments the negative aspects of existing
socialism were always attributed to capitalist influences (survival of the
elements of the old society, impact of anti-Communist “encirclement,” tyranny
of the world market, etc.), while the reverse possibility was never considered.
Thus Leftist histories ritualistically invoked Hitler to explain the rise of
Stalinism (the necessity of a draconian industrialization to meet the Nazi
threat) but never viewed Stalinism as a factor contributing to the rise of
Hitler. Yet, beginning with the socialist assault on bourgeois democracy and
the forced labor camps (which were a probable inspiration for Auschwitz)
Stalinism was a far more palpable influence in shaping German politics in the
Thirties than was Nazism in Soviet developments. The “Trotskyite conspiracy
with the Mikado and Hitler”---the cabal which the infamous show trials claimed
to expose---was a Stalinist myth; but the alliance that German Communists
formed with the Nazi Party to attack the Social Democrats and destroy the
Weimar Republic was an actual Stalinist plot. Without this alliance, the united
parties of the Left would have formed an formidable barrier to the Nazis’
electoral triumph and Hitler might never have come to power.

The same double standard underlies the Left’s failure to understand
the Cold War that followed the allied victory. Leftist Cold War histories
refuse to concede that the anti-Communist policies of the Western powers were a
reasonable response to the threat they faced; instead, the threat itself is
viewed as a fantasy of anti-Communist paranoia. Soviet militarism and
imperialism, including the occupation of Eastern Europe, are dismissed as
merely reactive -- defensive responses to Western containment. But when the
same Western actions produce the opposite result -- Soviet withdrawal from
Eastern Europe and, with that, an end to the Cold War -- they are alleged to
have had no influence at all. In sum, positive developments in the Soviet bloc
come from within; negative developments are the consequences of counter-revolutionary
encirclement.

The double standards that inform the arguments of the Left are really
expressions of the Left’s false consciousness, the reflexes by which the Left
defends an identity rooted in its belief in the redemptive power of the
socialist idea. Of course the revolution
cannot be judged by the same standards as the counter-revolution: the first is
a project to create a truly human future, the latter only an attempt to
preserve an anti-human past. This is why, no matter how destructive its consequences
or how absolutely it fails, the revolution deserves our allegiance; why anti-Communism is always a far greater
evil than the Communism it opposes. Because revolutionary evil is only a birth
pang of the future, whereas the evil of counter-revolution lies in its desire
to strangle the birth.

It was this birth in which Kolakowski had finally ceased to believe.
The imagined future in whose name all actually existing revolutions had been
relieved of their failures and absolved of their sins, he had concluded, was
nothing more than a mistaken idea.

When Kolakowski’s reply to Thompson was printed in The Socialist Register 1974, you
prefaced its appearance with an editorial note describing it as a “tragic
document.” At the time, I was in the middle of my own political journey and
this judgment was like the first stone in the wall that had begun to separate
us. For I already had begun to realize just how much I agreed with everything
Kolakowski had written.

It is clear to me now, in retrospect, that this moment marked the end
of my intellectual life in the Left. It occurred during what for me had been a
period of unexpected and tragic events. In Vietnam, America had not stayed the
course of its imperial mission, as we had said it would, but under pressure
from our radical movement had quit the field of battle. Our theory had assured
us the capitalist state was controlled by the corporate interests of a ruling
class, but events had shown that the American government was responsive to the
desires of its ordinary citizens. Closer to home, a friend of mine named Betty
Van Patter had been murdered by a vanguard of the Left, while the powers of the
state that we had condemned as repressive had been so impotent in reality as to
be unable even to indict those responsible. These events -- for reasons I need
not review here -- confronted me with questions that I could not answer, and in
the process opened an area of my mind to thoughts that I would previously have
found unthinkable.

The shock of these recognitions dissolved the certainties that
previously blocked my political sight. For the first time in my political life,
I became inquisitive about what our opponents saw when they saw us. I began to
wonder what if. What if we had been
wrong in this or that instance, and if so, what if they had been right? I asked these questions as a kind of
experiment at first, but then with systematic determination until they all
seemed to be pushing towards a single concern: What if socialism were not
possible after all?

While I was engaged with these doubts, Kolakowski published Main Currents of Marxism[7]
a comprehensive history of Marxist thought, the world view we all had spent a
lifetime inhabiting. For three volumes and fifteen hundred pages Kolakowski analyzed
the entire corpus of this intellectual tradition. Then, having paid critical
homage to an argument which had dominated so much of humanity’s fate over the
last hundred years (and his own as well), he added a final epilogue which began
with these words: “Marxism has been the greatest fantasy of our century.” This
struck me as the most personally courageous judgment a man with Kolakowski’s
history could make.

By the time I read your review of Kolakowski’s book,[8]
my own doubts had taken me to the perimeter of Kolakowski’s position.
Consequently, I approached what you had written, in a mood of apprehension,
even foreboding. For I already knew that this would be our final encounter on
my way out of the community of the Left, the last intellectual challenge I
would have to meet.

It was appropriate that the final terrain of battle should be Marxism.
Thompson had it right, our allegiance was
to Marxism. Not to this particular thesis or that doctrinal principle, but to
the paradigm itself: politics as civil war; history as a drama of social
redemption.[9] If we
remained in the ranks of the Marxist Left, it was not because we failed to
recognize the harsh facts that Marxists had created, but because we did not
want to betray the vision that we shared with the creators.

And so the question that would irrevocably come to divide us was not
whether Marxists had committed this revolutionary crime, or whether that
revolutionary solution had veered off course; but whether the Marxist Idea
itself could be held accountable for the revolutions that had been perpetrated
in its name. In the end, it was ideas that made us what we were, that had given
us the power of perennial rebirth. Movements rose and fell, but the ideas that
generated them were immortal. And malleable as well. How easy it had proved in
1956 to discover humanitarian sentiments in Marx’s writings and thus distance
ourselves from Stalin’s crimes; how simple to append the qualifier “democratic”
to “socialist,” and thus escape responsibility for the bloody tyrannies that
socialists had created.

It was on this very point that Kolakowski had thrown down his
gauntlet, declaring that Marx’s ideas could not be rescued from the human ruins
they had created, that “the primordial intention” of Marx’s dream was itself
“not innocent.” History had shown, and analysis confirmed, that there was no
reason to expect that socialism could ever become real “except in the cruel
form of despotism.”[10]
The idea of socialism could not be freed from the taint incurred by its actual practice
and thus revitalized, as Thompson and the New Left proposed, because it was the
idea that had created the despotism in the first place. Marxism, as Kolakowski
had announced at the outset of his book, was a vision that “began in Promethean
humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalinism.”

You understood the gravity of the challenge. The claim that the
Promethean project of the Left led directly to the socialist debacle depended
on making two historical connections -- between Marxism and Leninism, and
between Leninism and Stalinism -- thus establishing the continuity of the
radical fate. You were contemptuous in your response:

To speak of Stalinism as following naturally and
ineluctably from Leninism is unwarranted. However, to speak of Stalinism as
‘one possible interpretation of Marx’s doctrine’ is not only unwarranted but
false.

A decade has passed since you wrote this. In the East it is the era of
glasnost; the silence of the past is
broken, the lies exposed. The Soviets themselves now acknowledge the genesis of
Stalinism in Lenin. Yet, even if you were still tempted to resist this
connection, it would not detain us. For it is the causal link between Marxism
and Stalinism that is the real issue, encompassing both.

Stalinism is not a possible
interpretation of Marx. What could you have been thinking to have written
this, to have blotted out so much of the world we know? Forget the Soviet
planners and managers who architected the Stalinist empire and found a
rationale in Marx’s texts for all their actions and social constructions,
including the Party dictatorship and the political police, the collectivization
and the terror, the show trials and the gulag.
These, after all, were practical men, accustomed to bending doctrine in the service
of real world agendas. Consider, instead, the movement intellectuals -- the
complex nouns who managed to be Marxists and
Stalinists through all the practical nightmares of the socialist epoch:
Althusser and Brecht, Lukacs and Gramsci, Bloch and Benjamin, Hobsbawm and
Edward Thompson too. Subtle Hegelians and social progressives, they were all
promoters of the Stalinist cancer, devoting their formidable intellects and
supple talents to its metastasizing terror. Were they illiterate to consider
themselves Marxists and Stalinists?
Or do you think they were merely corrupt? And what of the tens of thousands of
Party intellectuals all over the world who were not so complex, among them
Nobel-prize-winning scientists and renowned cultural artists who saw no particular
difficulty in assimilating Stalin’s gulag to Marx’s utopia, socialist humanism
to the totalitarian state? In obliterating the reality of these intellectual
servants of socialist tyranny, you manifest a contempt for them as thinking
human beings far greater than that exhibited in the scorn of their most
dedicated anti-Communist critics.

Stalinism is not just a possible
interpretation of Marxism. In the annals of revolutionary movements it is
without question the prevailing one. Of all the interpretations of Marx’s
doctrine since the Communist Manifesto,
it is overwhelmingly the one adhered to by the most progressives for the
longest time. Maoism, Castroism, Vietnamese Communism, the ideologies of the
actually existing Marxist states -- these
Stalinisms are the Marxisms that shaped the history of the epoch just past.
This is the truth that leftist intellectuals like you are determined to avoid:
the record of the real lives of real human beings, whose task is not just to
interpret texts but to move masses and govern them. When Marxism has been put
into practice by real historical actors, it has invariably taken a Stalinist
form, producing the worst tyrannies and oppressions that mankind has ever
known. Is there a reason for this? Given the weight of this history, you should
ask rather: How could there not be?

What persuaded us to believe that socialism, having begun everywhere
so badly, should possess the power to reform itself into something better? To
be something other than it has been? To pass through the inferno of its Stalinist tragedies to become the paradiso of our imaginations?

For we did believe in such a transformation. We were confident that
the socialized foundations of Soviet society would eventually assert themselves,
producing a self-reform of the Soviet tyranny. This was our New Left version of
the faith we inherited. This refusal to accept history’s verdict made socialism
a reality still. In the Sixties, when the booming capitalist societies of the
West made radical prospects seem impossibly remote, we had a saying among us
that the first socialist revolution was going to take place in the Soviet
Union.

The lineage of these ideas could be traced back to our original
complex noun, Trotsky: the legend of the revolution who had defied Stalin’s
tyranny in the name of the revolution. While the Father of the Peoples
slaughtered millions in the 1930s, Trotsky waited in his Mexican exile for
Russia’s proletariat to rise up and restore the revolution to its rightful path.
But as the waves of the Opposition disappeared into the gulag, and this prospect became impossibly remote, even Trotsky
began to waver in his faith. By the eve of the Second World War, Trotsky’s
despair had grown to such insupportable dimensions, that he made a final wager
with himself. The conflict the world had just entered would be a test for the
socialist faith. If the great war did not lead to a new revolution, socialists
would be compelled, finally, to concede their defeat -- to admit that “the present
USSR was the precursor of a new and universal system of exploitation,” and that
the socialist program had “petered out as a Utopia.”[11]
Trotsky did not survive to see the Cold War and the unraveling of his Marxist
dreams. In 1940, his dilemma was resolved when one of Stalin’s agents gained
entrance to the fortress of his exile in Mexico, and buried an ice pick in his
head.

But the fantasy survived. In 1953 Stalin died and a new Left
generation convinced itself that the long awaited metamorphosis was at last
taking place. With Stalin’s death came the Khrushchev thaw, the famous speech
lifting the veil on the bloody past, and a relaxation of the Stalinist terror.
To those on the Left who had refused to give up, these were signs that the
totalitarian caterpillar, having lodged itself in the cocoon of a backward
empire, was about to become the socialist butterfly of which they had dreamed.

We had our own complex noun to explain the transformation. Our mutual
friend, Isaac Deutscher, had emerged from the pre-war battles over Trotskyism
to become the foremost interpreter of the Russian Revolution to our radical
generation. What made Deutscher’s analysis so crucial to the self-understanding
behind our revival was that he recognized the fact that Stalinism, in all its
repugnance, was Marxist reality and had to be accepted as such. You, too,
accepted this then, though it has become convenient for you to deny it now,
just as you embraced the Leninist version of Marx’s doctrine as the only
socialist outlook that had actually produced a revolution. There were social
democrat Marxists, of course, who opposed Lenin and Stalin from the beginning.
But you dismissed them as sentimentalists --“socialists of the hearth” you
called them -- reformers who were content to tinker with capitalism and lacked
the fortitude to make a revolution.

Deutscher began with the reality that was given to us: the fact of
Stalinism, as it had taken root in the Empire of the Czars. But instead of
despairing like his mentor Trotsky, Deutscher began to explain why Stalinism,
in spite of itself, was being transformed into socialism. In Trotsky’s own
theories Deutscher had found an answer to Trotsky’s pessimism. While Trotsky
worried that there would be no revolution from below, Deutscher explained to us
why it was coming from above.

Stalinism,
Deutscher wrote, was “an amalgamation of Marxism with the semi-barbarous and
quite barbarous traditions and the primitive magic of an essentially
pre-industrial...society.” In short, Stalinism was the fulfillment of Lenin’s
famous prescription: with barbarism we
will drive barbarism out of Russia:

Under Stalinism...Russia rose to the position of
the world’s second industrial power. By fostering Russia’s industrialization
and modernization Stalinism had with its own hands uprooted itself and prepared
its ‘withering away.’[12]

The backwardness of Russian society had provided the Bolsheviks not
only with a revolutionary opportunity, but also an historical advantage. They
could avail themselves of modern technologies and social theories. Instead of
relying on the anarchic impulses of capitalist investment, they could employ
the superior methods of socialist planning. The result of these inputs would be
a modern economy more efficient and productive than those of their capitalist
competitors.

According to Deutscher, in mid-century the socialist bloc, which had
hitherto provided such grief for radicals like us, was poised for a great leap
forward:

With public ownership of the means of production
firmly established, with the consolidation and expansion of planned economy,
and -- last but not least -- with the traditions of a socialist revolution
alive in the minds of its people, the Soviet Union breaks with Stalinism in
order to resume its advance towards equality and socialist democracy.

The ultimate basis of this transformation was the superior efficiency
of socialist planning:

...superior efficiency necessarily translates
itself, albeit with a delay, into higher standards of living. These should lead
to the softening of social tensions, the weakening of antagonisms between
bureaucracy and workers, and workers and peasants, to the further lessening of
terror, and to the further growth of civil liberties.[13]

Deutscher wrote these words in 1957, a year in which the Soviets
celebrated the fortieth anniversary of the revolution by launching the first
space satellite into orbit. The feat dramatized the progress that had been
achieved in a single generation and heralded theend of the Soviets’ technological “apprenticeship” to the West.
The message of Sputnik to the faithful all over the world, Deutscher predicted,
was “that things may be very different for them in the second half of the
century from what they were in the first.” For forty years, their cause had
been “discredited...by the poverty, backwardness, and oppressiveness of the
first workers’ state.” But that epoch was now coming to an end. With the
industrial leap heralded by Sputnik, they might look forward to a time when the
appeal of Communism would be “as much enhanced by Soviet wealth and
technological progress as the attraction of bourgeois democracy has in our days
been enhanced by the fact that it has behind it the vast resources of the
United States.”[14]

This was the vision of the socialist future that the Soviet leadership
itself promoted. In 1961, Khrushchev boasted that the socialist economy would
“bury” its capitalist competitors and that by 1980 the Soviet Union would
overtake the United States in economic output and enter the stage of “full
communism,” a society of true abundance whose principle of distribution would
be “from each according to his ability to each according to his needs.”

As New Leftists, we took Khrushchev’s boast with a grain of salt. The
Soviet Union was still a long way from its Marxist goals. Moreover, as
Deutscher had warned, any future Soviet progress might be “complicated,
blurred, or periodically halted by the inertia of Stalinism, by war panics,
and, more basically, by the circumstance that the Soviet Union still remains in
a position of overall economic inferiority vis-à-vis its American antipode.”[15]
Actual socialism was still a myth that Stalinism had created. But it had a
redeeming dimension: the myth had helped “to reconcile the Soviet masses to the
miseries of the Stalin era” and Stalinist ideology had helped “to discipline
morally both the masses and the ruling group for the almost inhuman efforts
which assured the Soviet Union’s spectacular rise from backwardness and poverty
to industrial power and greatness.”[16]

To us, Deutscher’s sober assessment was even more intoxicating than
the Khrushchev myth. Its mix of optimism and “realism” became the foundation of
our political revival. The turn Marxism had taken in 1917, creating a socialist
economy within a totalitarian state, had posed a seemingly insoluble riddle.
How could socialist progress be reconciled with such a stark retreat into
social darkness? What did this portend for Marx’s insight that the mode of
production determined the architecture of social relations? Building on
Trotsky’s prior analysis, Deutscher pointed to what seemed to be the only way
out of the dilemma that would preserve our radical faith.

And no doubt that is why, thirty years later, even as the tremors of glasnost and perestroika were unhinging the empire that Communists had built,
you returned to Deutscher’s prophecy as a revolutionary premise. “Much that is
happening in the Soviet Union [you wrote in The
Socialist Register 1988] constitutes a remarkable vindication of
[Deutscher’s] confidence that powerful forces for progressive change would
eventually break through seemingly impenetrable barriers.”[17]

Nothing could more clearly reveal how blind your faith has made you.
To describe the collapse of the Soviet Empire as a vindication of Deutscher’s
prophecies (and thus the Marxist tradition that underpins them) is to turn
history on its head. We are indeed witnessing a form of “revolution from above”
in the Soviet Union, but it is a revolution that refutes Deutscher and Marx. The events of the past years
are not a triumph for socialism. The rejection of planned economy by the
leaders of actually existing socialist society, the pathetic search for the
elements of a rule of law (following the relentless crusades against “bourgeois
rights”), the humiliating admission that the military superpower is in all
other respects a third world nation, the incapacity of the socialist mode of
production to enter the technological future and the unseemly begging for the
advanced technology that it has stolen for decades from the capitalist West --
all this adds up to a declaration of socialism’s utter bankruptcy and historic
defeat. This bankruptcy is not only moral and political, as before, but now
economic as well.

It is precisely this economic bankruptcy that Deutscher did not
foresee, and that forecloses any possibility of a socialist revival. For all of
these post-Khrushchev decades, that revival has been premised on the belief in
the superiority of socialist economics.
This is the meaning of the claim, so often repeated in Leftist quarters, that
the “economic rights” and “substantive freedoms” of socialist states took
precedence over the political rights
and merely procedural freedoms
guaranteed by the capitalist West. Faith in the socialist future had come to
rest on the assumption that abundance would eventually flow from the cornucopia
of socialist planning and that economic abundance would then lead to political
deliverance -- the Deutscherian thesis.

In our New Left fantasies the political nightmare of the socialist
past was to be redeemed by the deus ex
machina of socialist plenty. The present economic bankruptcy of the Soviet
bloc puts this faith finally to rest and brings to an end the socialist era in
human history.

This is the reality you have not begun to face.

It is important to understand this reality, which signals the close of
an historical era. But this can be accomplished only if we do not deny the
history we have lived. You can begin this retrieval of memory by recalling your
critique of Kolakowski ten years ago, which set down the terms of your defense
of the cause to which we were all so dedicated.

Your complaint against Kolakowski, you remember, was that in
demolishing the edifice of Marxist theory he had slighted the motives of those
who embraced it and thus failed to explain its ultimate appeal. Kolakowski had
portrayed Marxism as the secular version of a religious quest that went back to
the beginning of human history: how to reconcile contingent human existence to
an essence from which it was estranged -- how to return humanity to its true
self. For Kolakowski, Marxism was the messianic faith of a post-religious
world. Naturally, such an explanation would be insulting to you. You rejected
it as “superficial,” inadequate (you said) to explain Marxism’s attraction to
“so many gifted people.” In your view, Marxism’s appeal was not to those hungry
for religious answers, but to people who responded to the call “to oppose great
evils and to create conditions for a different kind of world, from which such
evils would be banished.” The call to fight these evils was the crucial factor
in enlisting people in the cause of the Left, and you named them:
“exploitation, poverty and crisis, war and the threat of war, imperialism and
fascism, the crimes of the ruling classes.”[18]

Let us pass for a moment over the most dramatic of these evils --
exploitation, crisis, war, imperialism, fascism, and the crimes of “ruling
classes,” including the vast privileges of the nomenklatura -- from which you will agree Marxist societies
themselves have not been free since their creation. Let us consider, rather,
the simple poverty of ordinary people, whose redress was the most fundamental
premise of the revolutionary plan. Let us look at what has been revealed by glasnost about the quality of the
ordinary lives of ordinary people after 70 years of socialist effort -- not
forgetting that 40 million human beings (the figure is from current Soviet
sources) were exterminated to make possible this revolutionary achievement.

Official statistics released during glasnost indicate that after 70 years of socialist development 40%
of the Soviet population and 79% of its older citizens live in poverty.[19]
(Of course, judged by the standards of “exploitative” capitalist systems, the
entire Soviet people live in a state of poverty.)

Thus, the Soviet Union’s per capita income is estimated by Soviet
economists as about one-seventh that of the United States, somewhere on a par
with Communist China.[20]

In the Soviet Union in 1989 there was rationing of meat and sugar, in peacetime; the rations revealed that
the average intake of red meat for a Soviet citizen was half of what it had been for a subject of the Czar in 1913. At the
same time, a vast supermarket of fruits, vegetables and household goods,
available to the most humble inhabitant of a capitalist economy, was
permanently out of stock and thus out of reach for the people of the socialist
state. Indeed, one of the principal demands of a Siberian miners’ strike in
1989 was for an item as mundane and basic to a sense of personal well-being as
a bar of soap. In a land of expansive virgin forests, there was a toilet paper
shortage. In an industrial country with one of the harshest and coldest
climates in the world, two-thirds of the households had no hot water, and a
third had no running water at all. Not only was the construction of housing
notoriously shabby, but space was so scarce, according to the government paper,
Izvestia, that a typical working
class family of four was forced to live for 8 years in a single 8x8 foot room,
before marginally better accommodation became available. The housing shortage
was so acute that at all times 17% of Soviet families had to be physically
separated for want of adequate space.

After 50 years of socialist industrialization, the Soviet Union’s
per-capita output of non-military goods and services placed it somewhere
between 50th and 60th among the nations of the world.
More manufactured goods were exported annually by Taiwan, Hong Kong, South
Korea or Switzerland, while blacks in apartheid South Africa owned more cars
per capita than did citizens of the socialist state. The only area of
consumption in which the Soviets excelled was the ingestion of hard liquor. In
this they led the world by a wide margin, consuming 17.4 liters of pure alcohol
or 43.5 liters of vodka per person per year, which was five times what their
forebears had consumed in the days of the Czar. At the same time, the average
welfare mother in the United States received more income in a month, than the
average Soviet worker could earn in a year.

Nor was the general deprivation confined to households and individual
consumption. The “public sector” was equally desolate. In the name of progress,
the Soviets devastated the environment to a degree unknown in other industrial
states. More than 70% of the Soviet atmosphere was polluted with five times the
permissible limit of toxic chemicals, and thousands of square miles of the
Soviet land mass was poisoned by radiation. Thirty percent of all Soviet foods
contained hazardous pesticides and six million acres of productive farmland
were lost to erosion. More than 130 nuclear explosions had been detonated in
European Russia for geophysical investigations to create underground pressure
in oil and gas fields, or just to move earth for building dams. The Aral Sea,
the world’s largest inland body of water, was dried up as the result of a
misguided plan to irrigate a desert. Soviet industry operated under no controls
and the accidental spillage of oil into the country’s eco-systems took place at
the rate of nearly a million barrels a day.[21]

Even in traditional areas of socialist concern, the results were
catastrophic. Soviet spending on health was the lowest of any developed nation
and basic health conditions were on a level with those in the poorest of third
world countries. A third of the hospitals had no running water, the training of
medical personnel was poor, equipment was primitive and medical supplies
scarce. (US expenditures on medical technology alone were twice as much as the
entire Soviet health budget.) The bribery of doctors and nurses to get decent
medical attention and even amenities like blankets in Soviet hospitals was not
only common, but routine. So backward was Soviet medical care, 30 years after
the launching of Sputnik, that 40% of the Soviet Union’s pharmacological drugs
had to be imported, and much of these were lost to spoilage due to primitive
and inadequate storage facilities. Bad as these conditions were generally, in
the ethnic republics they were even worse. In Turkmenia, fully two-thirds of
the hospitals had no indoor plumbing. In Uzbekistan, 50% of the villages were
reported to have no running water and 93% no sewers. In socialist Tadjikistan,
according to a report in Izvestia,
only 25-30% of the schoolchildren were found to be healthy. As a result of bad
living conditions and inadequate medical care, life expectancy for males
throughout the Soviet Union was 12 years less than for males in Japan and 9
years less than in the United States -- and less for Soviet males themselves
than it had been in 1939.

Educational conditions were no less extreme. “For the country as a
whole,” according to one Soviet report, “21 percent of pupils are trained at
school buildings without central heating, 30 percent without water piping and
40 percent lacking sewerage.”[22]
In other words, despite sub-zero temperatures, the socialist state was able to
provide schools with only outhouse facilities for nearly half its children.
Even at this impoverished level, only 9 years of secondary schooling were
provided on average, compared to 12 years in the United States, while only 15
percent of Soviet youth were able to attend institutions of higher learning
compared to 34 percent in the U.S.

Education, housing and health were the areas traditionally emphasized
by socialist politics because they affect the welfare of a people and the
foundations of its future. In Deutscher’s schema, Soviet schools (“the world’s
most extensive and modern education system,” as he described it) were the keys
to its progressive prospect. But, as glasnost
revealed, Soviet spending on education had declined in the years since Sputnik
(while US spending tripled). By the 1980s it was evident that education was no
more exempt from the generalized poverty of socialist society than other
non-military fields of enterprise. Seduced by Soviet advances in nuclear arms
and military showpieces like Sputnik, Deutscher labored under the illusion of
generations of the Left. He too believed that the goal of revolutionary power
was something else than power itself.

For years the Left had decried the collusion between corporate and
military interests in the capitalist West. But all that time the entire socialist economy was little more
than one giant military industrial complex. Military investment absorbed 25% of
the Soviet gross product (compared to only 6% in the United States) and
military technology provided the only product competitive for export. Outside
the military sector, as glasnost
revealed, the vaunted Soviet industrial achievement was little more than a
socialist mirage -- imitative, archaic, inefficient, and one-sided. It was
presided over by a sclerotic nomenklatura
of state planners, which was incapable of adjusting to dynamic technological
change. In the Thirties, the political architects of the Soviet economy had
over-built a heavy industrial base, and then as if programmed by some invisible
bureaucratic hand, had rebuilt it again and again.

Straitjacketed by its central plan, the socialist world was unable to
enter the “second industrial revolution” that began to unfold in countries
outside the Soviet bloc after 1945. By the beginning of the 1980s the Japanese
already had 13 times the number of large computers per capita as the Soviets
and nearly 60 times the number of industrial robots (the U.S. had three times
the computer power of the Japanese themselves). “We were among the last to
understand that in the age of information sciences the most valuable asset is
knowledge, springing from human imagination and creativity,” complained Soviet
President Gorbachev in 1989. “We will be paying for our mistake for many years
to come.”[23] While
capitalist nations (including recent “third world” economies like South Korea)
were soaring into the technological future, Russia and its satellites, caught
in the contradictions of an archaic mode of production, were stagnating into a
decade of zero growth, becoming economic anachronisms or what one analyst
described as “a gigantic Soviet socialist rust belt.”[24]
In the 1980s the Soviet Union had become a military super-power, but this
achievement bankrupted its already impoverished society in the process.

Nothing illustrated this bankruptcy with more poignancy than the
opening of a McDonald’s fast-food outlet in Moscow about the time the East
Germans were pulling down the Berlin Wall. In fact, the semiotics of the two
were inseparable. During the last decades of the Cold War, the Wall had come to
symbolize the borders of the socialist world, the Iron Curtain that held its
populations captive against the irrepressible fact of the superiority of the
capitalist societies in the West. When the Wall was breached, the terror was
over, and with it the only authority ever really commanded by the socialist
world.

The appearance of the Moscow McDonald’s revealed the prosaic truth
that lay behind the creation of the Wall and the bloody epoch that it had come
to symbolize. Its Soviet customers gathered in lines whose length exceeded
those waiting outside Lenin’s tomb, the altar of the revolution itself. Here,
the capitalist genius for catering to the ordinary desires of ordinary people
was spectacularly displayed, along with socialism’s relentless unconcern for
the needs of common humanity. McDonald’s executives even found it necessary to
purchase and manage their own special farm in Russia, because Soviet potatoes
-- the very staple of the people’s diet -- were too poor in quality and
unreliable in supply. On the other hand, the wages of the Soviet customers were
so depressed that a hamburger and fries was equivalent in rubles to half a
day’s pay. And yet this most ordinary of pleasures -- the bottom of the food
chain in the capitalist West -- was still such a luxury for Soviet consumers that
to them it was worth a four hour wait and a four hour wage.

Of all the symbols of the epoch-making year, this was perhaps the most
resonant for leftists of our generation. Impervious to the way the unobstructed
market democratizes wealth, the New Left had focused its social scorn precisely
on those plebeian achievements of consumer capitalism, that brought services
and goods efficiently and cheaply to ordinary people. Perhaps the main
theoretical contribution of our generation of New Left Marxists was an
elaborate literature of cultural criticism made up of sneering commentaries on
the “commodity fetishism” of bourgeois cultures and the “one-dimensional”
humanity that commerce produced. The function of such critiques was to make its
authors superior to the ordinary liberations of societies governed by the
principles of consumer sovereignty and market economy. For New Leftists, the
leviathans of post-industrial alienation and oppression were precisely these
“consumption-oriented” industries, like McDonald’s, that offered inexpensive
services and goods to the working masses -- some, like the “Sizzler”
restaurants, in the form of “all you can eat” menus that embraced a variety of
meats, vegetables, fruits and pastries virtually unknown in the Soviet bloc.

These mundane symbols of consumer capitalism revealed the real secret
of the era that was now ending, the reason why the Iron Curtain and its Berlin
Walls were necessary, why the Cold War itself was an inevitable by-product of
socialist rule: In 1989, for two hour’s labor at the minimum wage, an American
worker could obtain, at a corner “Sizzler,” a feast more opulent, more
nutritionally rich and gastronomically diverse than anything available to
almost all the citizens of the socialist world (including the elite) at almost
any price.

In the
counter-revolutionary year 1989, on the anniversary of the Revolution, a group
of protesters raised a banner in Red Square that summed up an epoch: Seventy Years On The Road To Nowhere.
They had lived the socialist future and it didn’t work.

This epic of
human futility reached a climax the same year, when the socialist state
formally decided to return the land it had taken from its peasants half a
century before. The collectivization of agriculture in the Thirties had been
the very first pillar of the socialist Plan and one of the bloodiest episodes
of the revolutionary era. Armies were dispatched to the countryside to
confiscate the property of its recalcitrant owners, conduct mass deportations
to the Siberian gulag, liquidate the “kulaks” and herd the survivors into the
collective farms of the Marxist future.

In this “final”
class struggle, no method was considered too ruthless to midwife the new world
from the old. “We are opposed by everything that has outlived the time set for
it by history” wrote Maxim Gorky in the midst of battle: “This gives us the
right to consider ourselves again in a state of civil war. The conclusion
naturally follows that if the enemy does not surrender, he must be destroyed.”
The destruction of the class enemy -- the most numerous and productive element
of Soviet society at the time -- was accomplished by massacres, by slow deaths
in concentration camps and by deliberately induced genocidal famine. In the
end, over 10 million people were killed, more than had died on all sides in
World War I.[25]

But the new
serfdom the Soviet rulers imposed in the name of liberation only destroyed the
peasants’ freedom and incentive, and thus laid the foundations of the final
impasse. Before collectivization, Russia had been the “breadbasket of Europe,”
supplying 40% of the world’s wheat exports in the bumper years 1909 and 1910.[26]
But socialism ended Russia’s agrarian plenty and created permanent deficits --
not merely the human deficit of those who perished because of Stalinist
brutalities during the collectivization, but a deficit in grain that would
never be brought to harvest because of the brutality inherent in the socialist
idea. Half a century after the socialist future had been brought to the
countryside, the Soviet Union had become a net importer of grain, unable to produce enough food to feed its own
population.

These deficits
eventually forced the state to allow a portion of the crop to be sold on the
suppressed private market. Soon, 25% of Soviet grain was being produced on the
3% of the arable land reserved for private production. Thus necessity had
compelled the Soviet rulers to create a dramatic advertisement for the system
they despised. They had rejected the productive efficiencies of the capitalist
system as exploitative and oppressive. Yet, the socialist redistribution of
wealth had produced neither equity nor justice, but scarcity and waste. At the
end of the 1980s, amidst growing general crisis, Soviet youth were using bread
as makeshift footballs because its price had been made so low(to satisfy the demands of social equity)
that it was now less than the cost of the grain to produce it. This was a
microcosm of socialist economy. Irrational prices, bureaucratic chaos, and
generalized public cynicism (the actually existing socialist ethos in all
Marxist states) had created an environment in which 40% of the food crop was
lost to spoilage before ever reaching the consumer. And so, half a century
after 10 million people had been killed to “socialize the countryside,” those
who had expropriated the land were giving it back.

The road to nowhere had become a detour. (Soviet joke: What is socialism? The longest road from capitalism to
capitalism.) Now the Soviet rulers themselves had begun to say that it had
all been a horrible “mistake.” Socialism did not work. Not even for them.

Of all the scenarios of the Communist gotterdammerung, this denouement had been predicted by no one.
Ruling classes invariably held fast to the levers of their power. They did not
confess their own bankruptcy and then proceed to dismantle the social systems
that sustained their rule, as this one had. The reason for the anomaly was
this: the creators and rulers of the Soviet Union had indeed made a mistake.
The system did not work, not even in terms of sustaining the power of its
ruling class.

The close of the Soviet drama was unpredicted because the very nature
of the Soviet Union was without precedent. It was not an organic development,
but an artificial creation -- the first society in history to be dreamed up by
intellectuals and constructed according to plan. The crisis of Soviet society
was not so much a traditional crisis of legitimacy and rule, as it was the
crisis of an idea -- a monstrously
wrong idea that had been imposed on society by an intellectual elite; an idea
so passionately believed and yet so profoundly mistaken, that it had caused
more human misery and suffering than any single force in history before.

This suffering could not be justified by the arguments of the Left
that the revolutionary changes were “at least an improvement on what existed
before.” Contrary to the progressive myth that radicals invented to justify
their failures, Czarist Russia was not a merely pitiful, semi-barbaric state,
when the socialists seized power. By 1917, Russia was already the 4th
industrial power in the world. Its rail networks had tripled since 1890, and
its industrial output had increased by three-quarters since the century began.
Over half of all Russian children between eight and eleven years of age were
enrolled in schools, while 68% of all military conscripts had been tested
literate. A cultural renaissance was underway in dance, painting, literature
and music, the names Blok, Kandinsky, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Diaghelev,
Stravinsky were already figures of world renown. In 1905 a constitutional
monarchy with an elected parliament had been created, in which freedom of the
press, assembly and association were guaranteed, if not always observed. By 1917,
legislation to create a welfare state, including the right to strike and
provisions for workers’ insurance was already in force and -- before it was
dissolved by Lenin’s Bolsheviks -- Russia’s first truly democratic democratic
parliament had been convened.[27]

The Marxist Revolution destroyed all this, tearing the Russian people
out of history’s womb and robbing whole generations of their minimal
birthright, the opportunity to struggle for a decent life. Yet even as this
political abortion was being completed and the nation was plunging into its
deepest abyss, the very logic of revolution forced its leaders to expand their
Lie: to insist that the very nightmare they had created was indeed the kingdom
of freedom and justice the revolution had promised.

It is in this bottomless chasm between reality and promise that our
own argument is finally joined. You seek to separate the terror-filled
actualities of the Soviet experience from the magnificent harmonies of the
socialist dream. But it is the dream itself that begets the reality, and
requires the terror. This is the revolutionary paradox you want to ignore.

Isaac Deutscher had actually appreciated this revolutionary equation,
but without ever comprehending its terrible finality. The second volume of his
biography of Trotsky opens with a chapter he called “The Power and The Dream.”
In it, he described how the Bolsheviks confronted the situation they had
created: “When victory was theirs at last, they found that revolutionary Russia
had overreached herself and was hurled down to the bottom of a horrible pit.”
Seeing that the revolution had only increased their misery, the Russian people
began asking: “Is this...the realm of
freedom? Is this where the great leap has taken us?” The leaders of the
Revolution could not answer. “[While] they at first sought merely to conceal
the chasm between dream and reality [they] soon insisted that the realm of
freedom had already been reached -- and that it lay there at the bottom of the
pit. ‘If people refused to believe, they had to be made to believe by force.’”[28]

So long as the revolutionaries continued to rule, they could not admit
that they had made a mistake. Though they had cast an entire nation into a
living hell, they had to maintain the liberating truth of the socialist idea.
And because the idea was no longer believable, they had to make the people
believe by force. It was the socialist idea that created the terror.

Because of the nature of its political mission, this terror was
immeasurably greater than the repression it replaced. Whereas the Czarist
police had several hundred agents at its height; the Bolshevik Cheka began its career with several
hundred thousand. Whereas the Czarist
secret police had operated within the framework of a rule of law, the Cheka (and its successors) did not. The
Czarist police repressed extra-legal opponents of the political regime. To
create the socialist future, the Cheka
targeted whole social categories -- regardless of individual behavior or
attitude -- for liquidation.

The results were predictable. “Up until 1905,” wrote Aleksander
Solzhenitsyn, in his monumental record of the Soviet gulag, “the death penalty was an exceptional measure in Russia.”
From 1876 to 1904, 486 people were executed or seventeen people a year for the
whole country (a figure which included the executions of non-political
criminals). During the years of the 1905 revolution and its suppression, “the
number of executions rocketed upward, astounding Russian imaginations, calling
forth tears from Tolstoy and...many others; from 1905 through 1908 about 2,200
persons were executed---forty-five a month. This, as Tagantsev said, was an epidemic of executions. It came to an
abrupt end.”[29]

But then came the Bolshevik seizure of power: “In a period of sixteen
months (June 1918 to October 1919) more than sixteen thousand persons were
shot, which is to say more than one
thousand a month.” These executions, carried out by the Cheka without trial and by revolutionary
tribunals without due process, were executions of people exclusively accused of
political crimes. And this was only a drop in the sea of executions to come.
The true figures will never be known, but in the two years 1937 and 1938,
according to the executioners themselves, half a million ‘political prisoners’ were shot, or 20,000 a month.

To measure these deaths on an historical scale, Solzhenitsyn also
compared them to the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition, which during the 80
year peak of its existence, condemned an average of 10 heretics a month.[30]
The difference was this: The Inquisition only forced unbelievers to believe in
a world unseen; Socialism demanded that they believe in the very Lie that the
revolution had condemned them to live.

The author of our century’s tragedy is not Stalin, nor even Lenin. Its
author is the political Left that we belonged to, that was launched at the time
of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals, and that has continued its
assault on bourgeois order ever since. The reign of socialist terror is the responsibility
of all those who have promoted the Socialist idea, which required so much blood
to implement, and then did not work in the end.

But if socialism was a mistake, it was never merely innocent in the
sense that its consequences could not have been foreseen. From the very
beginning, before the first drop of blood had ever been spilled, the critics of
socialism had warned that it would end in tyranny and that economically it
would not work. In 1844, Marx’s collaborator Arnold Ruge warned that Marx’s dream
would result in “a police and slave state.” And in 1872, Marx’s arch rival in
the First International, the anarchist Bakunin, described with penetrating
acumen the political life of the future that Marx had in mind:

This government will not content itself with
administering and governing the masses politically, as all governments do
today. It will also administer the masses economically, concentrating in the
hands of the State the production and division of wealth, the cultivation of
land,...All that will demand...the reign of scientific
intelligence, the most aristocratic, despotic, arrogant, and elitist of all
regimes. There will be a new class, a new hierarchy...the world will be divided
into a minority ruling in the name of knowledge, and an immense ignorant
majority. And then, woe unto the mass of ignorant ones![31]

If a leading voice in Marx’s own International could see with such
clarity the oppressive implications of his revolutionary idea, there was no
excuse for the generations of Marxists who promoted the idea even after it had
been put into practice and the blood began to flow. But the idea was so
seductive that even Marxists who opposed Soviet Communism, continued to support
it, saying this was not the actual socialism that Marx had in mind, even though
Bakunin had seen that it was.

So powerful was the socialist idea that even those on the Left who
took their inspiration from Bakunin rather than Marx and later opposed the
Communists, could not bring themselves to defend the democratic societies of
the capitalist West that the Marxists had put under siege. Like Bakunin, they
were sworn enemies of capitalism, the only industrial system that was
democratic and that worked. Yet their remedy for its deficiencies -- abolishing
private property and the economic market -- would have meant generalized
poverty and revolutionary terror as surely as the statist fantasies of Marx. By
promoting the socialist idea of the future and by participating in the war
against the capitalist present, these non-Marxist soldiers of the political
Left became partners in the very tragedy they feared.

Of all Marx’s critics, it was only the partisans of bourgeois order
who understood the mistake that socialists had made and thus appreciated the
only practical, and therefore real, social bases of human freedom: Private
property and economic markets. In 1922, as the Bolsheviks completed the
consolidation of their political power, the Austrian economist Ludwig Von Mises
published his classic indictment of the socialist idea and its destructive
consequences. Von Mises already knew that socialism could not work and that no
amount of bloodshed and repression could prevent its eventual collapse. “The
problem of economic calculation,” he wrote, “is the fundamental problem of
socialism” and cannot be solved by socialist means. “Everything brought forward
in favor of Socialism during the last hundred years,...all the blood which has
been spilt by the supporters of socialism, cannot make socialism workable.”
Advocates of socialism might continue “to paint the evils of Capitalism in
lurid colors” and to contrast them with an enticing picture of socialist
blessings, “but all this cannot alter the fate of the socialist idea.”[32]
Von Mises’ thesis was elaborated and extended by the former socialist
Friederich Von Hayek, who argued that the information conveyed through the
price system was so complex and was changing so dynamically, that no planning
authority, even with the aid of the most powerful computers conceivable, could
ever succeed in replacing the market.[33]

Across the vast empire of societies that have put the socialist idea
to the test, its fate is now obvious to all. Von Mises, Hayek, Polanyi, and the
other prophets of capitalist economy are now revered throughout the Soviet
bloc, even as the names of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky are despised. Their works --
once circulated only in samizdat --
were among the first of glasnost to
be unbanned. Yet, in the socialist and Marxist press in the West, in articles
like yours and in the efforts of your comrades to analyze the “meaning” of the
Communist crisis, the arguments of the capitalist critics of socialism, who
long ago demonstrated its impossibility and who have now been proven correct,
are nowhere considered. As if they had never been made.

For socialists, like you, to confront these arguments would be to
confront the lesson of the history that has passed: The socialist idea has been
in its consequences, one of the worst and most destructive fantasies to ever
have taken hold of the minds of men.

And it is the idea that Marx
conceived. For 200 years, the Promethean project of the Left has been just
this: To abolish property and overthrow the market, and thereby to establish
the reign of reason and justice embodied in a social plan. “In Marxist utopianism,
communism is the society in which things are thrown from the saddle and cease
to ride mankind. Men struggle free from their own machinery and subdue it to
human needs and definitions.” That is Edward Thompson’s summary of Marx’s
famous text in the first volume of Capital:

The life-process of society, which is based on
the process of material production, does not strip off its mystical veil until
it is treated as production by freely associated men, and is consciously
regulated by them in accordance with a settled plan.[34]

The “fetishism of commodities” embodied in the market is, in Marx’s
vision, the economic basis of the alienation at the heart of man’s estate: “a
definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the
fantastic form of a relation between things.”[35]
The aim of socialist liberation is humanity’s re-appropriation of its own
activity and its own product -- the reappropriation of man by man -- that can
only be achieved when private property and the market are replaced by a social
plan.

The slogan Marx inscribed on the banners of the Communist future,
“from each according to his ability to each according to his need,” is but an
expropriated version of Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand under which the pursuit of
individual interest leads to the fulfillment of the interests of all. But in
the socialist future there is no market to rule over individual human passions
and channel self-interest into social satisfaction, just as there is no rule of
law to protect individual rights from the passions that rule the state. There
is only the unmediated power of the socialist vanguard exercised from the
sanctuary of its bureaucratic throne.

All the theorizing about socialist liberation comes down to this: The
inhabitants of the new society will be freed from the constraints of markets
and the guidelines of tradition and bourgeois notions of a rule of law. They
will be masters in their own house and makers of their own fate. But this
liberation is, finally, a Faustian bargain. Because it will not work. Moreover,
the effort to make it work will create a landscape of human suffering greater
than any previously imagined.

Towards the end of his life, our friend Isaac Deutscher had a
premonition of the disaster that has now overtaken the socialist Left. In the
conclusion to the final volume of his Trotsky trilogy, The Prophet Outcast, he speculated on the fate that would befall
his revolutionary hero if the socialist project itself should fail:

If the view were to be taken that all that the
Bolsheviks aimed at -- socialism -- was no more than a fata morgana, that the revolution merely substituted one kind of
exploitation and oppression for another, and could not do otherwise, then
Trotsky would appear as the high priest of a god that was bound to fail, as
Utopia’s servant mortally entangled in his dreams and illusions.

But Deutscher did not have the strength to see the true dimensions of
the catastrophe that socialism had in store. Instead, his realism only served
to reveal the depths of self-delusion and self-justifying romanticism that
provide sustenance for the Left. Even if such a failure were to take place, he
argued, the revolutionary hero, “would [still] attract the respect and sympathy
due to the great utopians and visionaries...

Even if it were true that it is man’s fate to stagger in pain and blood from
defeat to defeat and to throw off one yoke only to bend his neck beneath
another---even then man’s longings for a different destiny would still, like
pillars of fire, relieve the darkness and gloom of the endless desert through
which he has been wandering with no promised land beyond.[36]

This is the true self-vision of the Left: An army of saints on the
march against injustice, lacking itself the capacity for evil. The Left sees
its revolutions as pillars of fire that light up humanity’s deserts, but burn
no civilizations as they pass. It lacks the ability to make the most basic
moral accounting, the awareness that the Marxes, Trotskys, and Lenins
immeasurably increased the suffering of humanity, and destroyed even those
blooms existing civilizations had managed to put forth.

Without socialism, the peoples of the Russian Empire, might have moved
into the forefront of the modern industrial world (as the Japanese have) without
the incalculable human cost. Instead, even the most productive of the Soviet
satellites, East Germany, once the Prussian powerhouse of European
industrialism, is now condemned to a blighted economic standard below that of
Italy, South Korea or Spain.

Consider the history of our century. On whose heads does the
responsibility lie for all the blood that was shed to make socialism possible?
If the socialist idea is a chimera and the revolutionary path a road to
nowhere, can the revolutions themselves be noble or innocent even in intention?
Can they be justified by the lesser but known evils they sought to redress? In
every revolutionary battle in this century, the Left has been a vanguard
without a viable future to offer, whose only purpose was to destroy whatever
civilization actually existed.

Consider: If no one had believed Marx’s idea, there would have been no
Bolshevik Revolution and Russia might have evolved into a modern democracy and
industrial state; Hitler would not have come to power; there would have been no
cold war. It is hard not to conclude that most of the bloodshed of the 20th
Century might not have taken place. For seventy years the revolutionary Left
put its weight on one side in the international civil war that Lenin had
launched, and against the side that promoted human freedom and industrial
progress. And it did so in the name of an idea that could not work.

The communist idea is not the principle of the modern world, as Marx
supposed, but its anti-principle, the reactionary rejection of political
individualism and the market economies of the liberal West. Wherever the
revolutionary Left has triumphed, its triumph has meant economic backwardness
and social poverty, cultural deprivation and the loss of political freedom for
all those unfortunate peoples under its yoke.

This is the real legacy of the Left of which you and I were a part. We
called ourselves progressives, and others did as well; but we were the true
reactionaries of the modern world whose first era has now drawn to a close.

The iron curtain that divided the prisoners of socialism from the free
men and women of the West has now been torn down. The iron curtain that divides
us remains. It is the utopian dream that is so destructive and that you refuse
to give up.Your
ex-comrade,

David

[1]Ralph Miliband, an English
Marxist, author of Parliamentary
Socialism and other works, who was my mentor during the years I was in
England 1963-1967

[4] “The Crisis
of Communist Regimes,” New Left Review
September-October 1989. As New Left professor Michael Burawoy actually wrote in
a special issue of Socialist Review:
“Marxism is dead, long live Marxism!” Now
What? Responses to Socialism's Crisis of Meaning, Volume 20 No. 2
April-June 1990.

[5] In
commenting on the “sharpness of tone” in your review of Kolakowski’s trilogy on
Marxism you explained: “I think this is in part attributable to a strong
personal sense of disappointment at Kolakowski’s political evolution. I have
known Kolakowski since the fraught days of 1956 and have always thought him to
be a man of outstanding integrity and courage, with a brilliant and original
mind. His turning away from Marxism and, as I see it, from socialism has been a
great boon to the reactionary forces of which he was once the dedicated enemy,
and a great loss to the socialist cause, of which he was once the intrepid
champion. I felt that loss very keenly...” Ralph Miliband, Class Power & State Power, Political Essays. London 1983 pp.
226-7

[6] Kolakowski,
“The Priest and the Jester” (1959) in Towards
a Marxist Humanism.

[8]
“Kolakowski’s Anti-Marx,” Political
Studies, vol. XXIX, no. 1 (1981). Kolakowski's reply, “Miliband’s
Anti-Kolakowski,” is printed in the same issue. A revised version of Miliband's
review is printed in Ralph Miliband, Class
Power and State Power, op. cit.

[9] “At the core
of Marxist politics, there is the notion of conflict [as]...civil war conducted
by other means. [Social conflict] is not a matter of ‘problems’ to be ‘solved’
but of a state of domination and subjection to be ended by a total
transformation of the conditions which give rise to it.” Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics, Oxford 1977, p. 17

[10] Cited in
Thompson, Poverty of Theory, p. 345
For Kolakowski’s analysis of the impossibility of non-totalitarian Marxist
socialism, see “The Myth of Human Self-Identity” in Stuart Hampshire ed. The Socialist Idea, NY 1973 For
Thompson’s scholastic response to this argument, see Thompson op. cit.

[20]Robert Heilbroner, “After
Communism,” The New Yorker, September
10, 1990

[21]“No other great industrial civilization so systematically ands so long
poisoned its air, land, water and people. None so loudly proclaiming its
efforts to improve public health and protect nature so degraded both. And no
advanced society faced such a bleak political and economic reckoning with so
few resources to invest toward recovery.” Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly
Jr., Ecocide in the USSR. NY Basic Books

[28] Isaac
Deutscher, The Prophet Unarmed,
Trotsky 1921-1929, NY 1965 pp. 1-2 The internal quote refers to a passage from
Machiavelli that Deutscher had used as an epigraph to The Prophet Armed, “...the nature of the people is variable, and
whilst it is easy to persuade them, it is difficult to fix them in that
persuasion. And thus it is necessary to take such measures that, when they
believe no longer, it may be possible to make them believe by force.”